pühapäev, jaanuar 29, 2006

Dilbert.com

Jan 29, 2006

Today's episode captures the essence of an incident I faced with a moron about six months ago! This guy came very thrilled to me telling me that we were going to make plenty of money by him selling a piece of software I was going to make for him.

This was the first time I'd heard I was supposed to write software for him, and other than the general purpose, had little idea of how this thing was supposed to work.

I already know this guy's working style, so my approach was to reply to him: That's super cool! Now all I need from you is a complete and detailed list of all of the data fields you want to manage. This list must include specifications of what kind of data each will be (numeric, text, etc.). If the data is numeric, I need to know what's the maximum value, if you'll be storing decimals, if you'll be storing negative values. I also need to know what's the formula to calculate those numeric values, and a throrough list of behaviours each time a certain value is reached for each of these items. In case the data is text, it need you to tell me...

And so on and on and on... and then this guy's thrill quickly transformed from eagerness to boredom and uninterest. Funny, if the work is all mine, then he's thrilled, but if he has to give input, then he's not.